The Oracle

The many lives of Arianna Huffington.

Huffington at home, with a painting by Françoise Gilot. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Arianna Huffington’s best-selling biographies of Maria Callas (1981) and Pablo Picasso (1988) both open with anecdotes intended to illuminate an essential truth about the subject’s fate. Were she to write her own life, Huffington said not long ago, she would begin in the spring of 1969. Huffington—then Stassinopoulos—and her mother, Elli, had moved from Athens to London, where they lived in a rented flat in Manchester Square, so that Arianna could take the entrance exams for Cambridge. (She had resolved to attend the university a couple of years earlier, after seeing a picture of it in a magazine. “It was a perfect example of what we now call visualization,” she later wrote.) Finally, one afternoon, a telegram arrived: “AWARDED. GIRTON. EXHIBITION.” Neither Arianna nor her mother understood the term “exhibition,” so they called Arianna’s tutor, who explained that she had won a partial scholarship to Girton College.

Huffington entered Cambridge that fall. She lived in a single room, with a heater she fed with shillings. Her Greek-inflected English was better suited to the classroom than to the class prejudices of her fellow-students. “One day, I said something in a group like ‘horseback riding,’ ” she said recently, “and I was literally laughed at, like, ‘What other kind of riding is there? Donkey riding?’ ”

During a student-group fair, Huffington toured the chambers of the university’s debating society. Since girlhood, she had possessed a spiritual impulse, studying Hinduism and fasting on the name day of the Virgin Mary. The Cambridge Union became another cathedral. “I just threw myself into it,” she recalled. “I went to every debate. I must literally have sat there with my mouth open. I was so spellbound by the spectacle of great speakers and people being moved or angered by their words.”

This may sound familiar. The slack-jawed outsider eventually became the society’s president (“Starryanna Comeacroppalos” to her less kind peers), who became a conservative commentator and consort (“The Greek Pudding”), who became an Upper East Side socialite (“The most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus”), who became a Republican political wife, a divorcée cable comedienne, a self-help writer, a progressive, an early environmentalist, a failed gubernatorial candidate, a blogger, an Internet mogul, and, through it all, one of the Anglophone world’s most nimble and ubiquitous communicators. Her enduring infatuation with the power of chat has led her to rarely, if ever, turn down an invitation to talk, whether on CNN (so far this year, she’s done “Larry King Live” a dozen times) or at the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (mark your calendar for May, 2009).

One afternoon last spring, Huffington, who lives in Los Angeles, was in Seattle, having agreed to serve as the key-note speaker at an annual Planned Parenthood benefit luncheon. (A fan of the cause, she waived her fee, and even, when a collection plate went around, got out her checkbook.) Long a regular on the conference circuit, she is often found in the sorts of places that require lanyards. Her vocabulary is full of business-book terms—“aha moment,” “meme.” When she hangs up the phone, she some-times says, “I’m jumping off.” At night, she hides her BlackBerrys (she has three) in the bathroom.

Seated at a table of philanthropists at Seattle’s Bell Harbor International Conference Center, Huffington produced a couple of hard-boiled eggs—food as fuel—from her pocketbook and deposited them on her plate. She is almost six feet tall, and has a tiny forehead, a peaked upper lip, and hair with the lustre of a copper pot. She is approachable, but, when approached, she assumes a default posture: hands clasped, one foot pointed in front, like a gymnast about to begin the floor exercise. Her comportment is flirty yet disciplined—wearing a ruffled blouse, as she did in Seattle, she could have been channelling a French maid or George Washington. Eventually, she ascended the stage. “Now trust me, I have two teen-age daughters,” she began. “I would love it if abstinence was the way to go.”

The cheek and the candor that characterize Huffington’s public speaking also inform the Huffington Post, which Huffington, together with the former A.O.L. executive Kenneth Lerer, launched in 2005. The site—“an Internet newspaper”—comprises a news aggregator, six “verticals” (if the Huffington Post were a broadsheet, these would be sections B to G), and a group blog, to which around two thousand people contribute, including, famously, such friends of Huffington as Ari Emanuel, Alec Baldwin, Larry David, Nora Ephron, and John Cusack.

Although Huffington was known as a conservative for most of her life, the Huffington Post is a kind of liberal foil to the Drudge Report. According to Nielsen Online, in February it drew 3.7 million unique visitors, surpassing Drudge for the first time. Its advertisers have included Starbucks, Volkswagen, Home Depot, and the Times. In August, the site logged 5.1 million unique visitors. This election season, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—whom Huffington supported over Clinton, in part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq—attempted to harness the voting power of its impassioned readership, with Clinton contributing posts about child poverty and the Bush Administration’s threats to reproductive rights, and Obama justifying his position on the FISA bill and clarifying his relationship to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Aesthetically, the site recalls a muckraking tabloid, with its splashy, often very funny headlines (“MCCAIN WANTS A TIME OUT—BUT WHY?”) and exclamation points. Its editorial sensibility can be equally blunt. Nonpolitical links and posts tend to fall within entertaining, if inelegant, categories: gee-whiz (“SOUTH KOREA CLONED DOGS FOR WOMAN”), health-alert (“WHY FATTY FISH IS GOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN”), pop-psych (“4 SUREFIRE WAYS TO RELAX”), go-girl (“ANNE HATHAWAY—IT’S TIME TO GET SMART ABOUT THE MEN YOU DATE!”).

Fifty per cent of the Huffington Post’s traffic comes from its political coverage. Lefty umbrage—at President Bush, at the war, at the Patriot Act, at John McCain’s five-hundred-and-twenty-dollar Ferragamo loafers and his “spoiler” role in the Wall Street bailout—with a satiric bent is its signature mode. When news broke that McCain had picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, the Huffington Post had within hours posted shots of her as Miss Wasilla 1984. In the course of the Presidential race, the site has supplemented commentary with original reporting by six paid political editors and reporters and, as part of a project called OffTheBus, eleven thousand citizen journalists.

The site has produced big scoops, several of which have reverberated throughout the race. First, one of the citizen journalists, Mayhill Fowler, reported Obama’s remark about the frustration of “bitter” small-town voters who “cling to guns or religion.” Then Fowler incited Bill Clinton to call the Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum, who had published a story suggesting that Clinton was becoming a liability to the Party, a “scumbag.” Because Fowler had failed to identify herself as a journalist, some of the more entrenched members of the press accused her of compromising professional standards, but it was hard to see what she had compromised, other than some Obama votes and Clinton’s dignity, given that both incidents took place before onlookers.

After McCain’s assertion, in September, that he would “suspend” his campaign to attend to the financial crisis, Sam Stein, a Huffington Post reporter, called fifteen McCain headquarters in swing states, and found that none of them had interrupted their operations. A blog entry by Huffington published in May, titled “What John McCain Told Me, and What It Says About How Far He’s Fallen,” was also explosive, but murkier. In it, Huffington wrote that, at a dinner party some years earlier, McCain had remarked to her that he hadn’t voted for George W. Bush. McCain’s spokespeople have denied the story. Huffington, in any case, is not known for her discretion. “I’ve got to be careful after the John McCain thing,” her friend the talk-show host Tavis Smiley told me. “I don’t know where what I say is going to end up.”

After Huffington’s talk to Planned Parenthood, she visited the Microsoft campus to moderate a panel discussion with Mark Penn, the Hillary Clinton strategist, and Cyrus Krohn, the eCampaign director for the Republican National Committee. Waiting in the green room, she pumped the men for intelligence.

“Florida, Michigan—what’s going to happen?” she asked Penn.

Krohn told Huffington that the R.N.C. had registered ten thousand friends on Facebook. “It’s a great time to be a Republican,” he said. “There’s nowhere to go but up.”

It is a measure of Huffington’s standing that even Republicans feel obliged to curry her favor. She clearly relishes her role as an essential conduit of gossip and ideas. When I asked her to name her favorite book, she mentioned the epigraph to “Howard’s End,” and said, “I remember the E. M. Forster line about ‘Only connect’ being a big aha moment.”

Dish is her capital—the means by which she makes connections and maintains them. Because she defines the agenda for the Huffington Post, which defines the agenda for so many readers, passing a tidbit her way is, in a sense, an investment. Proprietary hints are the dividend. “She knows the best of everything, from the best person to do yoga with to the best person to do your facials,” Laurie David, the environmental activist, said recently. “If you need anything, you ask Arianna.” In the time we spent together, Huffington let slip details on Jerry Brown (“Going to run for governor again”) and Sergey Brin (“His wife is pregnant!”).

Huffington’s business and spiritual pursuits merge in her interest in human-potential movements, the sorts of popular groundswell that, as she once wrote, will provide us, in “a new age that is being born,” with “an opening for great possibilities of new being, for a breakthrough in our evolution.” Once or twice a week, she leads a highly curated cast of friends on a hike. “She’s an inspiration to me,” Lynda Resnick, the pomegranate-juice magnate, said. “It was Laurie David’s birthday, in 2006. We were up in the Santa Monica mountains, and there was a vista, and we were sipping champagne out of splits with straws and eating soft cheese and hard salami. Laurie had just started to produce ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ Arianna’s Web site was going gangbusters, Rita Wilson”—Tom Hanks’s wife—“was about to appear in ‘Chicago’ on Broadway. ‘What are you doing outside of your comfort zone?’ Arianna asked me. And I said, ‘My biggest dream is to give back all I know about marketing.’ ”

Micah Sifry, the Internet entrepreneur, pointed out that part of Huffington’s success on the Web lies in the fact that she is attuned to its conversational quality. “It’s not just that she’s getting attention,” he said. “She’s sharing attention, too.” Many other people heralded her abilities as a “connector,” including Kenneth Lerer. “Here are the pockets: L.A., New York, D.C. Tell me somebody else who can bring those three cities together,” he said. “With Arianna, it’s not six degrees of separation, it’s two.” At times, her world can seem echoey. “David Geffen has already declared for Obama, and many other Hollywood power brokers, who are not ready to go public yet, are making it known in private that they are in the ABH (Anyone But Hillary) camp,” she asserted in the Los Angeles Times, in December, 2006, as though entertainment executives were crucial bellwethers of the American polity.

Back in Seattle, Huffington was finishing off the day with a lecture at Town Hall. Pen tucked into the front of her blouse, she took the stage. “I just saw Mark Penn at the Microsoft conference,” she began.

Several days earlier, Huffington had appeared at Google’s offices in New York City to promote her twelfth book, “Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need to Know to End the Madness).” The title pretty much sums it up: puns (“Dim Bulbs: Congress’s Low Wattage Energy Bill”), clichés (“the right-wing lunatics are running the Republican asylum”), and a lot of extra words (“ ‘Al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq’ still had the crowd roaring its approval and holding up metaphorical disposable lighters”) deployed in the service of ramming home some dubious points about the media and some good ones about the war, and health care, with an overheated, performative air that somehow recalls both Susan Powter and Michael Moore.

Huffington is defter in her appearances. “The media mouths the same talking point, which is that Iraq is a ‘mixed bag,’ ” she said, standing amid a jumble of oversized blue, green, and yellow Google building blocks. “Now, Iraq is not a mixed bag. Iraq is an unqualified catastrophe. Iraq is a mixed bag only in the sense that you go to the doctor and the doctor says to you, ‘You have a brain tumor but the good news is that your acne has cleared.’ ”

After a few minutes, it was time for a Q. & A. session. “Tell me who you are and what you’re doing here so I can also learn,” Huffington said.

A young man with a frizzy ponytail approached the microphone. “First, let me tell you, your hair looks fabulous in person,” he began.

“Why do you think that candidates like Kucinich and Ron Paul are unelectable?” he continued. “What comes first, being completely honest, or being unelectable?”

“Well, I actually would treat those two candidates separately,” Huffington said. “Because Ron Paul, even though he was very solid on the war, if you dig a little deeper he has some very kooky and strange views on a lot of issues. So I think Ron Paul is unelectable because he is largely a kook with a good view on Iraq.” The crowd laughed.

She segued into a fluent disquisition on the Bush Administration’s flawed decision to focus on Iraq at the expense of Afghanistan, and concluded, “Yes, we want peace, but we also agree on enemies. And so that is a very important distinction that Obama has made, and Kucinich failed to make.”

Huffington fielded a question from a software engineer. “You are very famous for a very distinguished set of mannerisms,” he said. “I’m wondering whether you like watching impressions of yourself.”

“Actually, Tracey Ullman is a genius,” Huffington said. “I don’t know if you saw her little sketch of me doing Pilates while I’m talking on my BlackBerry. I got a call from my Pilates teacher saying, ‘I want to absolutely swear to you, I did not tell her that you do Pilates!’ ” She added, “I’m delighted to hear that she’s going to be doing another series. But I do not sleep with my laptop.”

To professional funny people, Huffington is irresistible, both as friend and as fodder. She possesses the golden comedic ratio: a mind that is as flexible as her body is unwieldy. Arianna walks into a bar, Arianna drops a sparkly earring. (The bar is The Four Seasons.) Arianna gets into a car, Arianna bumps her head. Pratfalls are best performed by an ugly man or a beautiful woman, and Huffington, with her zany energy, can recall the heroine of a screwball comedy. Once, at a dinner party, a BlackBerry melted in her handbag, because she put the bag too close to an open fire. Another day, I called her on her cell phone and the line went staticky. “My hair is all wet!” Huffington said, over the din of a blow-dryer.

Last year, Huffington went out to dinner with Charlie Rose. Stepped on a grate, broke her ankle. (She was wearing a pair of Yves Saint Laurent platform heels.) Rose recommended a foot and ankle specialist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, Dr. Rock Positano. He is now a contributor to the Huffington Post. In the course of two days in May, Huffington invited the following people to be Huffington Post bloggers: someone at a book signing who had met her at Rob Reiner’s house; a fifteen-year-old lecture attendee; a bookstore owner; the Asperger’s-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j.; a woman, dressed exclusively in green, who was trying to stop insecticide spraying. Huffington is profligate in her offers. At Google, she urged the audience to e-mail her blog submissions, saying, “I mean, I’ll give you my own e-mail address.”

The pursuit of influence—the ability to command attention and to change minds—not money, seems to be Huffington’s driving quest. “Mmm, you smell so good! What are you wearing?” a fan asked one day, at a book signing. Huffington replied, “Samples! I can bring them through airport security.” She is a limousine liberal—one night in Los Angeles, as we were riding in a chauffeured Prius, Huffington remarked, “Can you imagine having to drive to work every day in this traffic?”—but she is not vain or particular, in the way of many of the Davos class, about food, clothing, or lodging. One day, I asked her what she was wearing: earrings given to her by Lynda Resnick, a watch from Steve Martin, a silk button-down blouse made by her friend the designer Domenico Vacca. She could have been a paper doll.

Harmless but shrewd small talk is a Huffington specialty: the first time we met, she had, within ten minutes, complimented me on my shoes, my jacket, my bag, and my dress. Critics and friends invoke a talent for friendship as one of her defining qualities, as, through the years, has much of her press. In the higher echelons of New York and Los Angeles society, merely asking a question about someone else is taken as evidence of savantlike people skills, but Huffington’s attempts at establishing intimacy can seem almost poignantly forced. “How do you recharge?” she will inquire of a relative stranger. “What is your favorite food?” Billy Kimball, the comedy writer, said, “She has that European woman’s gift of listening to you in a way that makes a person feel simultaneously fascinating and foolish. The person kind of fills in the end of the sentence, saying a little more than he necessarily wanted to.”

Whether she’s Icarus or Oprah—with her waxen good will, she’s probably something of both—Huffington projects curiosity. Last year, Tom Freston, the former MTV Networks executive, gave her an iPod loaded with world music. He recalled, “She says, I really love those songs by Alpha Blondy, who’s an Ivory Coast reggae star who sings about liberation and the oppression of black men.” Despite a seven-steps air, her kindnesses are frequent, and are not limited to any particular caste. Jose Antonio Vargas, a twenty-seven-year-old reporter at the Washington Post, told me that Huffington introduced herself to him at a Washington Press Club Foundation dinner after overhearing someone mistake him for a busboy.

Socializing is a form of work—it takes energy, it pays off—and Huffington applies herself to it as assiduously as she does to any other task. “When I was in England, I would literally, like, watch everything,” she said. “I would watch pop-culture shows, I would read pop-culture magazines. I remember sitting there and watching ‘Laugh-In.’ And I did the same when I moved to New York. I made a point of studying what I had missed.” In “Right Is Wrong,” she writes that members of the Bush Administration, as alarmists, are “the equivalent of the 1927 Yankees, the Steel Curtain Pittsburgh Steelers, or the Showtime-era Lakers of Magic, Kareem and James Worthy”—an impressive catalogue for someone who watches sports “very occasionally with friends.”

Laurie David met Huffington for the first time at her own house, where she and her husband were hosting an event for Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles. “Arianna made a beeline over to me and said, ‘Hello, we must hike,’ ” David recalled. “That’s one of her courting methods when she wants to meet somebody or get to know somebody.” Such a targeted approach might come off badly among more reticent types, but Huffington’s circle of friends is a self-selecting group. Lynda Resnick explained, “She, like me—we love powerful people.”

In May, Huffington attended the Time 100 Gala, a banquet affair at Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center, honoring “the most influential people in the world.” (Huffington was named to the list in 2006.) After a cocktail reception, she made her way to Table 16, where her companions included the hotel executive Gerald Inzerillo and her old friend Mort Zuckerman. As the guests ate lamb chops and asparagus (Huffington, Europeanly, plucked the spears from the plate with her fingers), Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers, of “Saturday Night Live,” performed a standup routine.

“You know, Seth, Time magazine continues to be incredibly influential,” Poehler said. “In 2007, the circulation was just around 3.4 million, which is great for a magazine. Just O.K. for a YouTube video, but pretty good for a magazine.”

“Not cats falling out of trees, but really good,” Meyers said. The allusion, to a viral video, caused Huffington’s face to crinkle with glee.

Poehler and Meyers proceeded to roast some honorees: Brian Williams, George Clooney, Dr. Mehmet Oz. “He is a cardiothoracic surgeon and a chef, so he’s a doctor that cooks,” Poehler said of Oz. “Which puts him on top of another list, ‘Most Popular on JDate.’ ”

Huffington leaned close to Zuckerman: “What’s JDate?”

Toward the end of the evening, Indra Nooyi, the C.E.O. of PepsiCo, and the mother of two, gave a toast. She spoke of “tradeoffs, regrets, losses, pain,” as Huffington nodded. “Fame is rot; daughters are the thing,” Nooyi concluded, quoting J. M. Barrie. Huffington locked eyes with me, across the table, and lifted her hand to her heart.

For the finale, a newly wed Mariah Carey, in a spangly silver halter dress, appeared with a six-piece band. Zuckerman passed a note around the table: “If you can write the lyrics, I’ll give you $1,000.” Carey’s performance, though, was surprisingly affecting. As she belted out the high notes of “Hero,” Zuckerman put his hand over Huffington’s. They held on for a while, letting go, eventually, to check their e-mail.

MySpace and Facebook have, in a way, made social climbing an outdated concept. Social climbing is now social networking, and the collecting of people is an unabashed pastime. Huffington’s friends speak admiringly of her conquests. “If Arianna wants to be your friend, I mean, give up, you’re like a weak swimmer in a strong tide,” Bill Maher told me. “I went with her to some big party—I was, like, ‘Oh, where’s Arianna?’ and, next thing I know, she’s sitting on the couch with Rupert Murdoch, chatting away like the old friends of the world.”

Plenty of people, anyway, want to endear themselves to her. One day, I attempted to make her acquaintance on Facebook, and received an automated reply: “Arianna has too many friends.”

The first time Huffington came to America, she found herself in York, Pennsylvania. She was fifteen, and a summer exchange student. The second time, she found herself in Manhattan. She was twenty-three, and the author of “The Female Woman,” a rebuttal to Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch.” Huffington has written that, to promote the book, her publisher had scheduled her to appear on television with Barbara Walters: “This didn’t faze me, since I had no idea who Barbara Walters was and had never heard of the ‘Today’ show.” A decade later, Walters was a bridesmaid in Huffington’s wedding. Walters told me, “Boy, she came to New York, and, little by little, you knew who Arianna Stassinopoulos was.”

Huffington’s father, Constantine, was a journalist and management consultant; her mother, Elli, came from a Russian family that had moved to Greece after the revolution. Constantine and Elli met at a sanatorium in Kifissia, a suburb of Athens, after the war—he was recovering after being incarcerated in German concentration camps (he had been arrested during the German occupation), she was recovering from tuberculosis. Elli had been told that she would never be able to have children, but, at their wedding, she was visibly pregnant.

Arianna was born in 1950, and her sister, Agapi, a classically trained actress and a motivational speaker, in 1952. When Arianna was eleven and Agapi was nine, their parents split up. (Family lore holds that the preteen Arianna encouraged her mother to leave, saying, “You’re not happy, and you should be.”) “My parents really loved each other,” Agapi told me. “But it was the circumstances of him wanting to go out and have a girlfriend or two here and there, and that’s what my mother couldn’t tolerate.” The Stassinopouloses never divorced, and the girls remained close to their father, whose fortunes in business fluctuated. “We would go to Corfu, and he would gamble,” Agapi recalled. “He would give Arianna and me chips, and we would cash them in and make money, and play the little lottery machines.”

After the separation, Elli and the two girls moved from Kifissia to Athens, where they lived in an apartment on Mourouzi Street, across from a fire station. (Huffington recalls in her book “On Becoming Fearless” that Elli once locked her pocketbook inside, and had firemen prop a ladder up to the window.) Elli, an autodidact who spoke four languages, fostered a warm, open environment. On Saturdays, a teacher instructed the family in yoga. Elli would stand on her head. “She was the nonconformist of the neighborhood,” Huffington says. One of Elli’s favorite sayings was “Your dowry is your education.” Also: “Darling, let it marinate.” And “Give yourself a hundred per cent to whatever you are doing.” (The yoga stuck, but not the admonition against multitasking. Her favorite pose, Huffington told me, is trikonasana, “because you’re doing three things at once.”)

Arianna was a diligent child with an assertive streak—in a story she likes to tell, she chases the neighborhood kids, who are disturbing her reading, away from her own birthday party. She and Agapi would play “Swan Lake”; Arianna choreographed. Mostly, Arianna was a reader. “I just knew I would never be bored early on,” she said. “It was, like, ‘Oh, my God, there are all these books!’ ”

Arianna arrived in England, at the height of Carnaby Street, a mini-adult. She was indifferent to rock and roll. She never tried pot. As a debater, she was indefatigable, and in her final year at Cambridge she participated in a televised debate on feminism. Her evisceration of the Women’s Liberation movement led to “The Female Woman” (1973), in which she argued that men and women should be free to occupy equal—but distinct—roles. Huffington now speaks of the book as a harbinger of post-feminism, but it is more reactionary than she may care to remember. (“Women’s Lib claims that the achievement of total liberation would transform the lives of all women for the better; the truth is that it would transform only the lives of women with strong lesbian tendencies.”) In any case, it was a hit, furthering her career as a budding celebrity contrarian.

In 1971, Arianna appeared on the BBC classical-music quiz show “Face the Music.” One of the other panelists was Bernard Levin, a columnist for the London Times. A lifelong bachelor, he was forty-two; she was twenty-one, and an admirer. (She clipped his columns from the paper, underlined them, and saved them in a special file.) By the end of the taping, according to Huffington, Levin had invited her to dinner. “All I remember is that I spent the week prepping, getting myself up to date on Northern Ireland, the latest developments in the Soviet Union, and the latest Wagner recordings,” Huffington wrote later.

Her cramming paid off, and she continued to immerse herself in Levin’s highly ritualized world: the theatre, opera, lobster, Wexford every year. “He used to say that going to bed with him was a liberal education,” Huffington, who still refers to Levin as “the big love of my life,” has said. Her writing from the era—her next book, “After Reason,” was a byzantine polemic against “political salvationism”—reflects his libertarian politics and orotund style. “It was just like everything was so delicious about him,” she told me.

The couple eventually embarked on a period of metaphysical inquiry that alienated some of their friends and colleagues as much as it entertained the press. Christopher Hitchens wrote, “Let the record show that in October 1979. . . Bernard Levin achieved the total state of self-absorption towards which he had been moving for so long. The venue was the Café Royal: amid incense and vaguely Oriental music, flanked by his companion, Levin rose and told a large invited audience how they could be ‘changed,’ by investing £150 in a 50-hour ‘Insight training.’ ” (Insight was founded by the spiritual leader John-Roger, with whom Huffington has remained affiliated. Huffington denies that incense and Oriental music played a role in the event.) When Levin died, in 2004, his obituary in the Times noted that Huffington’s “interest in mystic cults . . . was to lead him into one of the more embarrassing episodes of his journalism—his hyperbolic praise through a number of columns of the self-promoting guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.”

The relationship ended in 1980. Arianna, wanting children badly and armed with letters of introduction, moved to New York with her mother. They rented a town house on East Sixty-first Street, and soon were entertaining such luminaries as Dan Rather and Bill Paley, amid tables strewn with peaches and figs. Each morning, Arianna and Barbara Walters exercised together. New York declared in a story, “Arianna Stassinopoulos has become, in record time, a fixture in East Side social life, and without the advantages of wealth, a title, or conventional beauty.”

In 1985, the philanthropist Ann Getty, whom Arianna had become close friends with, orchestrated a get-together at her mansion in San Francisco with Michael Huffington, a Texas oil scion with conservative connections (in 1968, he was a summer intern for the first-term congressman George H. W. Bush). After a few more transcontinental group dates—a visit to the billionaire John Kluge’s farm in Virginia; a trip with Walters—Michael and Arianna became a serious couple. “I was most attracted to Arianna because of her intelligence and seductiveness,” Michael told me in an e-mail. “I had never met a woman like her.”

“The word that so many of my friends used about him was ‘adorable,’ ” Huffington recalled, but the alliance left some people puzzled. “Michael is a very nice man, but he certainly didn’t have Arianna’s spirit,” Walters told me. “He was very quiet, and hard to know, but, you know, nice, sweet.”

The couple married in April of 1986 in a ninety-minute black-tie ceremony at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan. The five hundred or so guests included Herreras, Kissingers, Rothermeres, and Buckleys. Ann Getty paid for the Huffingtons’ post-ceremony dinner—caviar, veal Florentine, Dom Perignon—the bill for which was reported to be significantly higher than what she had anticipated. Women’s Wear Daily devoted pages of coverage to the affair, noting that after the ceremony Huffington’s mother, smoking a cigar, told a reporter, “Now that I’ve got Arianna married off, I can go back to Greece.”

Hermes, the messenger, known for his protean gifts, is Huffington’s favorite Greek god, but her sister likens her to Athena. “She has the work ethic—her work is joy—and she loves creating in a very excellent way,” Agapi told me. “I remember her rehearsing, let’s say for a speech or monologue. If she missed a word, she would say to Mom, ‘Let’s start again.’ There was never a good-enough.”

Athena is also the goddess of war, and, throughout her career, Huffington has demonstrated a gladiatorial appetite for verbal combat. Her assessments of Bill Frist, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, campaign finance, the drug war, the war in Iraq—even at a time when questioning the war against terrorism wasn’t popular—have been unflinching. “AS ROME BURNS . . . MCCAIN CAMP TALKS LIPSTICK, PIGS, WOLVES, MOOSE, FISH, SNOW MOBILING AND SEX-ED FOR KINDERGARTNERS,” the Huffington Post’s front-page headline—the letters were the height of bullets—read in mid-September.

Following the outing of Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative, in 2003, one of the most frequent targets of Huffington’s censure was the New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Her coverage was relentless, scathing, and prescient. “In this scenario,” Huffington wrote on July 27, 2005, “Miller certainly wasn’t an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it.”

The posts, despite their ferocity, or perhaps because of it, reflected a Huffington hubris—the tendency to undercut her best argument by going over the top with it. “This is why Miller doesn’t want to reveal her ‘source’ at the White House—because she was the source,” Huffington wrote. I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Miller later stated, was her source.

Huffington’s willingness to resort to rhetoric to justify her fudges can be risible. “This isn’t journalism; it’s a Sag Harbor circle jerk,” Huffington wrote in March, 2006, after Vanity Fair published a story defending Miller. She chose to ignore the fact that, eight months earlier, she had substantiated her own criticisms by writing that she had heard them from people who knew Miller well, “since I spent the weekend in the vicinity of her summer hometown.”

Huffington can take an imperious tone with those who attempt to pin her down on her inconsistencies. In 1988, the Huffingtons moved from Washington, D.C., where Michael had worked in the Reagan Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for negotiations policy, to Santa Barbara, where he ran, and won, a race to represent the Twenty-second District in Congress. In 1994, he unsuccessfully challenged Dianne Feinstein for her Senate seat. The race was contentious.

Nick Welsh, a longtime political writer with the Santa Barbara Independent, who has written critically about Huffington, recalls, “What she did with me was she found some guy in town we both knew, and we all had to go out to lunch and do this emotional show-and-tell bullshit, yadda yadda yadda.” (Huffington denies having had a meal with Welsh.) Welsh continued to publish negative columns, including follow-up coverage of the bombshell that the Huffingtons employed an illegal-immigrant nanny, Marisela Garcia. Arianna then produced an affidavit, signed by Garcia’s husband, saying that Welsh had offered him money and a green card in exchange for stories, which he denied.

Huffington can be seductive, but she is not always as good at following through in her relationships. Her political transformation has contributed to some of her estrangements: Elaine Chao was her daughter Isabella’s original godmother, but the relationship became awkward for Huffington after Chao was appointed Secretary of Labor by President Bush, Huffington has written, “so I asked Isabella to pick another godmother among my girlfriends.” (She chose Lynda Resnick.) Huffington says that from her Cambridge years “there’s nobody I really stayed connected to.” She attributes her lack of lifelong friendships to her closeness to her sister and her mother, who died in 2000, but admitted, “I metabolize experiences fast.” As a heroic precedent, she invokes Charles de Gaulle, who, upon being told by an official that all the official’s friends were opposed to his policies, replied, “Changez vos amis.” (Huffington, of course, has changed her friends and her ideology.) She told me, “It’s, like, This happened, this didn’t work, let’s move on.”

Her breakups and makeups are legion. One spat involved the political consultant Ed Rollins, who worked on Michael’s 1994 Senate campaign. In 1996, Rollins published a memoir, in which he referred to Arianna as “the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I’d met in thirty years of national politics.” The book asserted, among other things, that she had hired private detectives to track Maureen Orth, who was writing a piece about her for Vanity Fair. “I have never hired a private investigator,” Huffington told me. “I just thought, Do I really want to spend the next year of my life suing Ed Rollins instead of letting life prove that he was wrong on so much about me?” She added that she had run into him the other day, “doing ‘Anderson Cooper,’ ” and invited him to blog for the Huffington Post.

The conflict between Huffington and Orth has continued to fester. In her 1994 story, “Arianna’s Virtual Candidate,” Orth reported, among other things, that Michael had “hugged” two young male staffers, and that Arianna had never volunteered at an abused-children’s charity that she claimed to support. (The story, which came out weeks before the election, was nominated for a National Magazine Award, though the Huffingtons dispute much of Orth’s account. “I like people, and I often give them a hug,” Michael Huffington said.) Orth also wrote that Arianna, while promoting her Christian values to the electorate, underplayed the extent of her involvement with John-Roger, the leader of the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, or M.S.I.A., calling him merely ‘a friend.’ ” Huffington told me, “I was feeling very defensive. I was trying to explain something that I shouldn’t have tried to explain. Because it was a different realm.”

Orth was married to Tim Russert, whom Huffington repeatedly criticized, until his death, this summer, referring to him in a section of “Right Is Wrong” entitled “Russert Watch!”—also a recurring series on the Huffington Post—as “journalism’s answer to the EZ Pass” and “the conventional wisdom zombie.” Huffington says that the critique was purely professional. Jenny Tartikoff, a spokesperson for NBC News, declined to comment, as did Orth, but the political commentator James Carville, a friend of Russert’s, asserted, “The view that Tim was an easy interviewer is unique to Arianna Huffington. It’s a personal assessment.”

Bob Woodward—“the dumb blonde of American journalism,” who is “so awed by his proximity to power that he buys whatever he’s being sold”—has been another recent target of Huffington’s barbs. “It’s a marketing technique, I guess,” Woodward told me. William Kristol, the Times columnist, had a similarly dismissive response to a passage from “Right Is Wrong,” in which Huffington repeats a cell-phone remark of Kristol’s—“ ‘Precipitous withdrawal’ really worked”—overheard on the 4 P.M. Acela from New York to Washington. She calls the remark “deluded triumphalist drivel.” Kristol e-mailed me:

I remember at the time thinking that she didn’t even get the conversation right (Arianna’s not used to furiously transcribing overheard conversations, I guess!)—but since I of course don’t remember what I said and didn’t take notes, I’d just prefer to leave it alone. I also remember her gotcha tone in her article for Huffington Post (haven’t seen the book), which was amusing, since I knew she was there—we’d had a three-minute conversation of the how are you, what are your kids doing variety when we got on.

“I am 100% convinced that Arianna and I married because we were madly in love with each other,” Michael Huffington e-mailed. “However, I don’t think it hurt that she was beautiful and I was wealthy. But beauty and wealth alone would not have brought us together in matrimony.”

Three years after the 1994 Senate race—Huffington ultimately conceded to Feinstein after a drawn-out recount, having spent almost thirty million dollars of his fortune and losing by under two per cent of the vote—the couple agreed to divorce. “Michael decided that he wanted to go off to Europe and go on a boat, and I wanted to pick up my life and continue writing,” Huffington recalled. “He wanted to check out, and I had checked in.”

In 1998, Michael acknowledged, in an interview with Esquire, that he had had sexual experiences with men. When I asked Arianna whether she was aware of this when they married—in the past, she has said that she was not—she said that she and Michael now have an agreement not to discuss the issue. When I asked Michael, he replied, “In December, 1985, in my Houston town house I sat down with her and told her that I had dated women and men so that she would be aware of it. I didn’t think it would be fair to her not to mention my bisexuality. . . . And the good news was that it was not an issue for her.” Today, they are friends. On what would have been their twentieth anniversary, Michael—who has converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church and is a sometime film producer—sent Arianna a bouquet of yellow roses with a card that read, “We’ll always be the parents of two remarkable young women.”

Since the divorce, Arianna has lived with their daughters—Christina, nineteen, and Isabella, seventeen—and Agapi in Brentwood. The house is often described as a mansion, but its feel is closer to that of a storybook cottage. A green patina gate with fleur-de-lis spikes swings open onto the driveway, suggesting admittance into a secret garden. In front of a white brick house, snuggled in ivy, are a basketball hoop and the family Priuses (which Huffington’s daughters refer to as the “Prii”). Inside, the pleasingly haphazard décor ranges from rococo and Victorian to Zen. Stuffed on a shelf along with a photograph of Christina and Senator Barbara Mikulski were candles, incense sticks, and a jar of vitamins.

Huffington, according to Agapi, “practically can’t make tea,” and, while she provides for her family, she is entirely dependent on it. With her daughters, she is as doting and demonstrative as her mother was with her. One day when Isabella was sick, she pulled her onto her lap, like a baby, and stroked her head. The day before, away in Seattle, she had made hamstery kissing noises over the phone and asked, “Are you going to sleep in Mommy’s bed?”

“We do life together,” Agapi told me. (The family also employs two housekeepers, including Garcia, who is now legal.) “We make the list, like we’re a team. We’re talking, ‘Oh, honey, don’t forget that we need to take the car to Toyota.’ It’s not, like, ‘Oh, well, then you go do the shopping.’ Sometimes she’ll say to me, ‘Can you just handle that, because I don’t have time for that?’ ” When Arianna is not on the road, she and Agapi like to retreat to Arianna’s bathroom together at the end of the day to take off their makeup.

The household operates with the loopy tribal chaos of a camp or a kibbutz. One day, one of the housekeepers needed seventy dollars, and so Arianna instructed her to look in her wallet.

Several minutes later, the housekeeper returned, to say that she hadn’t found the wallet.

“Ask Agapi,” Arianna said.

“She’s doing her meditation,” the housekeeper replied.

Visions, augurs, and instincts feature large in the cosmology of the Stassinopoulos sisters. Huffington’s first pregnancy ended in stillbirth, a tragedy forecast by a recurring dream in which the eyes of the baby in her womb would not open. Shortly after Christina’s birth, Huffington says, she underwent an out-of-body experience. “I had left it. I was looking down at myself, at Christina, at the tuberoses on the nightstand, at the entire room,” she wrote in “The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul,” her millennialist paean to “at-one-ment.” “For I don’t know how long, I hovered in that state of almost intangible peace.”

Perhaps the unifying strain of Huffington’s thought, through the years, is anti-relativism. She is a joiner and a believer, never apathetic or a cynic. In her world view, agnosticism may be the greatest sin. “The technological changes that are still emerging in the nineties . . . will be trivial compared to changes brought about by men and women tapping into the wisdom that flows like a river through the deepest caverns of the human psyche,” she wrote in “The Fourth Instinct.” That may seem a strange prophecy coming from a future Internet mogul, but both her business and her spiritual impulses stem from a long-held conviction that great change is afoot in our age, and that she is destined to be a part of it. Through all her incarnations, Huffington’s interest in mass movements, human potential, and the improvability of man has been as consistent as her suspicion of pharmacology, utilitarianism, and Skinner boxes. Her own life may be her greatest project.

In five decades of self-improvement, she has tried fire-walking, list-making, journal-keeping, mercury detoxification, homeopathy, chiropractic, infrared saunas, microdermabrasion, est, and—she writes in her 2006 book, “On Becoming Fearless”—“the Beverly Hills diet, the all-brown-rice diet, the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, the no carbs, no fat, indeed no calories diet.” Her daily regimen includes yoga, meditation, and prayer. Since 1996, she has donated ten per cent of her income to charity. Her numinous prescriptions—in a recent blog post on Obama, she devoted five paragraphs to urging him to get more sleep—have occasionally opened her up to ridicule in the political sphere. “She’s a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva,” Mark Salter, a McCain aide, told the Washington Post, after the dinner-party controversy. I asked if the ad-feminem attack bothered her, and she replied, “If someone called you, say, a burglar, would you care?”

Over the years, Huffington has been touchier about her relationship with John-Roger, the baby-faced spiritual leader of M.S.I.A., who was born Roger Delano Hinkins in Rains, Utah, in 1934, and, in 1963, rechristened himself upon his emergence from a nine-day coma induced by kidney-stone surgery. In an investigation published in the Los Angeles Times in 1988, the reporters Bob Sipchen and David Johnston linked John-Roger—whose students believe that he has unique access to a power called Mystical Traveler Consciousness—to financial and sexual improprieties. (John-Roger stated, through a spokesman, that the allegations “remain as untrue today as when they were first published.”) His views on the body are certainly unusual: In “Sex, Spirit & You,” he writes, “When a woman has a history of blocking her creative flow and shutting off this area of expression by pushing the energy back down into the creative center, she may develop many problems related to her menstrual flow.”

The relationship has, at times, made those around her uncomfortable. Barbara Walters recalled being introduced to John-Roger by Huffington in the eighties. “I did not take to him the same way that she had,” Walters said. “That caused a pause in our relationship, and, I think, of some others.”

Lately, Huffington seems less defensive about her relationship with John-Roger. The first day I spent with her, in San Francisco, she handed me an iPod, the contents of which included a guided meditation entitled “Innerphasing for Multidimensional Consciousness.” I clicked on it. A voice intoned, “Let go of any restrictions or limitations that you’ve placed on yourself and let God fill the space where the restrictions or limitations were.”

“This is the politics call, right?” Huffington said into a BlackBerry early one morning in San Francisco, from the back seat of a black town car. She had just dialled in to a phone conference with some of the Huffington Post’s editors and reporters in New York and Washington. “Hi, Sam,” she said, speaking to the political reporter Sam Stein. They discussed a story he was working on, about a Clinton donor. Apparently, the story was sensitive, and his sources’ identities would have to be protected. “I have a feeling we’re not going to be visiting you in jail,” Huffington said. “Just remember Judy Miller. . . . Look how well it turned out for her. . . . Ha ha. . . . Are you allowed to blog from jail? You can write ‘De Profundis,’ like Oscar Wilde.” As she talked, she checked another BlackBerry and daubed her cheeks with a powder puff. Addressing Nico Pitney, the site’s national editor, she went on, “Oh, and you know what? We never did a Chuck Hagel interview. . . . And say hi from me!”

Hagel—the Nebraska Republican, who is friendly with Obama—is one of Huffington’s current favorite politicians. Previously, she had been a sidekick of Newt Gingrich and an admirer of John McCain, with whom she travelled on the Straight Talk Express in 2000. Even as a conservative, Huffington supported abortion rights and gun control; her disillusionment with the Republican Party culminated in her helping to stage “shadow conventions” in 2000 alongside the Conventions of both parties. McCain, whom Huffington introduced as “the most prominent voice for reform within the political system” was a keynote speaker. (She now considers him a “Trojan horse”—“an older and crankier version of the man he couldn’t stomach voting for in 2000,” disguised as a maverick.) In 2004, she spoke in support of John Kerry, making her defection complete. Al Michaels, on Monday Night Football, once reportedly referred to a twenty-yard gain as showing “more change of direction than Arianna Huffington,” but her political evolution has, she claims, hinged on a simple revelation: that the private sector was not sufficient to solve society’s ills.

Huffington works from her Brentwood house—her office is a baronial space with a wood-beamed ceiling and stacks of books—as does the Los Angeles-based staff of the Huffington Post. The day I visited, she was cheerful and solicitous of the four staff members—assistants and associate blog editors—who were housed in a hidden office built into a second-floor nook, but there have been personnel problems. Since the Huffington Post launched, at least fifteen full-time, part-time, or contract employees have left the office. (An editor who had worked for Hunter S. Thompson for three years left after four months.) “What happened is that a lot of people who came to the office wanted to be writers,” Huffington said. “It was frustrating for people when the jobs are administrative. I have a responsibility for not making that clear in the beginning.” Because Huffington has employees sign a nondisclosure agreement, few of them were willing to speak on the record. I spoke to ten people who had worked in the Los Angeles office. Maegan Carberry characterized her tenure as a generally positive one, saying, “It was probably the most valuable professional experience I’ve had.” (Carberry now blogs for the Huffington Post.)

Many others described Huffington as an erratic employer. Some of her demands sounded typical of a highpowered, if high-strung, boss—one story involves an employee being chided for affixing a document with a pink paper clip rather than a regular silver one. (Huffington says this never happened.) “When Arianna wanted to be charming, funny, nice, whatever, she was a great boss,” Pete Keeley, who did some work for the Huffington Post in 2006, told me. “But then there were days where something was getting at her and there was nothing you could do right. One of the frustrating things was that she had absolutely no compunctions about saying, ‘Hey, do this,’ and then saying, ‘Why did you do that? I never asked you to do that.’ And you would say, ‘Yes, you did.’ And she would say, ‘Why would I say that? That’s ridiculous.’ So you were constantly put in the position of either backing down or calling your boss a liar.”

Admirers of Huffington often say the same things about her drive and her level of intensity as her detractors do. David Lack, who has known the family for years, told me, “Arianna will fight on, and she takes no prisoners. A lot of times, she has no conscience, either, about some of the damage she does behind her. She always goes on and figures it will fix itself by moving forward. And I give her credit. Only in America!”

Huffington’s frame of reference is capacious: the day she mentioned Judy Miller in the same breath as Oscar Wilde, I also heard her hold forth credibly on “Hamlet,” NAFTA, western Pakistan, and Apollo Creed. “I remember reading Ayn Rand in Greek and English and getting sent to the principal’s office because my essays were reflecting an Ayn Randian philosophy,” she told me one day, and the allusive nature of her considerable intelligence persists. Homework—lots of it—is at the heart of her approach to forming opinions and to arguing them. “Arianna wants to know everything,” Roy Sekoff, the founding editor of the Huffington Post, said. “She has the greatest capacity to take in and immediately utilize information. I’ve literally seen her stand somewhere, look at a piece of research, and then—boom!—go on TV and, word for word, nail the three most important points and leave out everything else.”

Her synthetic gifts have, at times in her career, raised questions. Her Maria Callas book prompted accusations of plagiarism from a previous biographer of Callas; the case was settled out of court. Lydia Gasman, now an emeritus arthistory professor at the University of Virginia, says that Huffington’s Picasso biography included themes similar to those in her unpublished four-volume Ph.D. thesis. “What she did was steal twenty years of my work,” Gasman told Maureen Orth in 1994. Gasman did not file suit. (Huffington denied both allegations.)

In 2006, the Huffington Post ran a piece, with the byline George Clooney, about freedom of speech. Clooney issued a statement saying that he had not written it. (Huffington, it emerged, had collated a number of Clooney’s public statements, fashioned them into a blog entry, and e-mailed them to a movie publicist for approval, which she had apparently not been entitled to give.) Under pressure from journalism watchdogs, and her own bloggers, who felt that such cut-and-paste tactics diminished their work, Huffington published a mea culpa, entitled “Lessons Learned,” in which she presented the Clooney affair as a one-time slip-up. Ten months earlier, a reporter from U.S.C. Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review had asked, “Will there be ghost writers or assistants who might write for some of the group bloggers?” “That will never happen,” Huffington had replied.

Huffington weathers skepticism about her personal life with ease, but her professional setbacks, particularly the 2003 California gubernatorial race, have exacted a toll. Huffington had been in Ireland on vacation with Tina Brown for forty-eight hours—“debating with her kids and mine whether to explore the teashops of Bunratty or the rainswept cliffs of Ballycotton,” Brown wrote—when she returned to L.A. to enter the race. Through an oddity of state electoral law, the Democratic governor, Gray Davis, had become the subject of an unprecedented recall election. Huffington took the position that Davis should be thrown out of office, joining a weirdo menagerie of candidates who included Mary Carey, a porn actress, and the former child star Gary Coleman.

According to Michael Huffington, both he and Arianna had expressed interest in running, but, at the urging of their children, they made a deal that neither would enter the race. “Yes, we had both agreed not to run for governor,” he wrote. “But she clearly changed her mind, and that was her prerogative.” Michael told CNN that their children, upset at her decision to run, temporarily moved out of the house (Arianna says this is inaccurate), and he endorsed Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Huffington’s campaign, from the start, was troubled: she arrived at City Hall to file her papers at the same time as Schwarzenegger, hoping to piggyback on his publicity; she ended up, to much comment, knocking over a bank of microphones intended for him. As her chances dimmed further, she formed a last-ditch progressive partnership with the Green Party politician Peter Camejo. Toward the end of September, after it was disclosed that she had paid only a total of seven hundred and seventy-one dollars in taxes for the previous two years, she dropped out of the race. (Huffington said that the bulk of her income was child-support payments.) Camejo, who died last month, recalled that she “then reversed her position, pulled out of the election, and began riding around with Davis on his airplane.” He continued, “My experience with her was that her ego plays a big role in her life, and her commitment to her political principles seems to vary depending on what wind is blowing and whatever might benefit her in the short term.”

During the race, Susan Estrich had published a cruel column portraying Arianna as a bad mother, prompting Huffington to comment, on a blog she had started for the campaign, on the reasons that women seem “unable to break the ‘glass ceiling’ in business and politics.” She continued, “Maybe it’s because every time they try to assert some power, the male-dominated political culture tries to cut them down.” It was a rare vulnerable moment for Huffington, who, through her career, has been admirably unhindered by her gender, or by worries about a conspiracy against it. She told me, “I had not really until that race felt that women, now in the twenty-first century, still needed role models.”

When the Huffington Post launched, on May 9, 2005, some commentators saw another quixotic Huffington whim. “Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the movie equivalent of ‘Gigli,’ ‘Ishtar,’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate’ rolled into one,” Nikki Finke wrote, in LA Weekly. Even Huffington may not have been confident that the site would prosper. She did not invest her own money in the launch. “Friends immediately offered to put up the money, and I felt I was putting in my sweat equity,” she told me.

The site has been a triumph. Since the launch, Huffington and Lerer have raised eleven million dollars. This year, they began to hire reporters and started a local bureau in Chicago; at the Democratic National Convention, they set up a lounge, providing free yoga lessons and facials to conventioneers. (And, presumably, to potential buyers. A recent Times article cited a sale-price estimate of the company at two hundred million dollars, though Huffington says that there are no immediate plans to sell.)

Many of her intimates say that she has seemed more at ease since emerging from the humiliation of the governor’s race to build a thriving business. “I think she’s much more comfortable in the world, whereas before she felt like she had to protect herself,” Agapi said. “I think she has shed a lot of layers.” She continued, “Even when I see her on TV, I think she’s much softer. Why? She doesn’t have to prove herself anymore in any way.” Tom Freston spoke of a new Arianna piety among the sort of bigwig male moguls who once regarded her as a lightweight—“They’re fascinated with her. They respect her for building a business out of nothing but her wits and determination”—while Christopher Hitchens invoked a butterfly: “I think this is the last chrysalis, the last pupation.” Michael Huffington said, “Arianna has definitely changed since she launched the Huffington Post. She is calmer, happier, and has clearly hit her stride in something in which she excels and enjoys.”

The days I spent with Huffington were marked by the fluidity of a person who loves what she does: there wasn’t much of a set agenda for her work on the site, but she was never not working on it, either. Huffington runs hard, and she can be a lot of fun. (I recall her in the ladies’ room after a radio show happily jabbering from a bathroom stall.) In San Francisco, when she popped into a Starbucks for her third latte of the day, it seemed hard to believe that the young fogey who once condemned the Gap, “a popular clothing chain catering to and defining the tastes of teenagers,” and rap music had become the go-with-the-flow populist who greeted every driver and barista—“What’s your name?” “Arianna!”—and, late that night, schlepped her rolling bag through the airport, hair mussed up and pulled into a banana clip.

Huffington’s decisions in life, contradictory as many of them have been, seem to have in common the conviction that the worst imaginable fate would be to have people not pay attention to her at all. In the face of turmoil, there’s a willful nonreactivity about her, a refusal—perhaps strengthened by her many years of mind exercises—to be deterred. As we were riding around Los Angeles one day, she began to talk about her mother: “She would cook a lot of Russian dishes, like blinchiki, which were crêpes with minced meat and vegetables, or artichokes with this great sauce, and there would always be some amazing lunch. We would go to school, and she would sit there—”

Huffington’s face crumpled into a grimace. As tears streamed down her cheeks, she continued to modulate her tone, as if she had been injected with some sort of emotional Botox, causing her mind to lag behind her body in its ability to express genuine feeling, rather than the other way around. “She was such a devoted mother,” Huffington said, taking concentrated breaths. “It’s hard to imagine how she was like—she was so full of love and it was like her whole life centered around us but without any of the dark things that people would imagine going with it. I just didn’t realize what a gift it was to grow up like that.”

Within seconds, she had pulled herself together. Shoulders back, chin up. I asked if she had considered writing an autobiography. She shook her head and replied, “Don’t you think that’s a sign that you are done?” ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.